


your heart's in the ground frozen over

by siojo



Category: One Piece
Genre: Ace as Tony Stark, Background Relationships, Bittersweet Ending, Captain America AU, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Minor Akagami no Shanks/Benn Beckman, Minor Fushichou Marco | Phoenix Marco/Portgas D. Ace, Off-screen Character Death, Past Character Death, Shanks as Captain America, mentioned minor character death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-13
Updated: 2020-03-13
Packaged: 2021-02-28 21:54:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,074
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23134246
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/siojo/pseuds/siojo
Summary: Shanks might not be good at lying himself, but he has always been good at recognizing them. Which is why it doesn't take long at all to realize the nurses are lying to him. It takes even less time to realize that this place is fake, an illusion, since they obviously never did any research.
Relationships: Akagami no Shanks | Red-Haired Shanks & Portgas D. Ace
Comments: 12
Kudos: 104





	your heart's in the ground frozen over

**Author's Note:**

> Shanks is Captain America in this au, which will deviate greatly from the MCU. Ace is Tony Stark and Marco is at first glance Pepper Potts, but that's not entirely true. Deuce is JARVIS, our Very Intelligent System

Shanks stares out the window, fake as it might be with a looping cast of people dressed almost accurately in clothing that he remembers perfectly. They don’t wear the same costume each time, but Shanks isn’t stupid enough to miss how they don’t change their hair or makeup. Harder still to buy their lies when they play the wrong songs on the radio. Shanks knows he’s never heard those songs before and he closes his eyes and pretends that it’s relaxing and not something unbelievably new, even if it’s nice to hear something he hasn’t before. Even the nurses are wrong.

The first two look like someone who had heard of Makino but never seen her before, bright lipstick and carefully pinned hair. Missing the fire and force that Makino had always given off, even when she had pretended to obey orders. Even when she had burned her way through ranks of men with just a sharp tongue.

“How are you feeling today, Captain?” this nurse is just as false as the others, her smile plastic and wrong. “You’ve been spending a lot of time looking out the window.”

“I’m not a captain,” Shanks corrects, because he was never officially part of the military. None of Project Yonko had been. They had been volunteers and spies, but never soldiers, certainly not after they had joined the project. “It’s agent, if you must.”

“Of course, agent. And the window?”

“Your costumes aren’t right. It’s not accurate, at least not enough. Why are you lying to me?” Shanks asks tiredly, standing up and flexing his fingers and waiting for a long moment for an answer.

“Lying?” There’s fear in her eyes, in the way she takes a step back from him. “What lies would I be telling?”

Shanks slams his palm against the wall holding the windows, watching it shatter under his hand before he jumps out, hurrying through the fake streets to the next wall he can find, breaking through it without any effort and onto another street. This street is different, people screaming as he slams past them and cars the likes he’s never seen before.

He forces himself to go faster, swerving around people and down streets that he doesn’t recognize. None of this is familiar but it’s better, better than the lie that those people had been trying to sell.

The rush of sleek black vehicles, all large and moving as one as they surrounding him are almost what he’s expecting. A capture.

Shanks is ready, he’s tired of fighting and he knows that this world is different now, but he won’t let them lock him away. He won’t let them keep him prisoner, not like this. 

“Shanks Akagami,” the man who steps out the first vehicle says easily, his arms folded behind his back. “You made quite the spectacle of yourself just now.”

“You’ve been lying to me,” Shanks says firmly, watching the rest of the men and women hurrying out of the cars to surround him. “You’ve been lying to me and I wanted answers. Since you wouldn’t give them to me, I thought I’d find them for myself.”

“You were asleep for a long time, Agent. Longer than you think. The world’s changed.”

“That’s nice, lovely sentiment,” Shanks pauses, trying to decide if it’s worth escaping them again. He’s lived on the streets before, he’s sure it’s only gotten worse now, but he can do it.

The man tips his head to the side, “Come along, Agent. I’m sure you have some questions that you’d like answered.”

“Just one,” Shanks corrects, allowing himself to be ushered into the car behind him. “What year is it?”

“That’s a very long story, Agent.”

Shanks considers running again, throwing open the door to the car and launching himself out into traffic, since that isn’t an answer and the man in front of him doesn’t look eager to reveal more than he had already, but he doesn’t. Shanks is patient, he had learned that teaching himself to use his right arm for everything. That didn’t mean he would make it easy on them to get what they wanted out of him. Benn would call it being a little brat, Shanks has always thought of it as being cautious.

“I think it’s a little rude that you know my name, but I don’t know yours,” Shanks says finally, leaning back in his seat with an easy grin, the same one that Benn had always told him meant trouble. “Unless that’s a long story too?”

“Agent Garp Monkey. I’m one of the Vice-commanders of MARINE,” he pauses, arms crossed over his chest as he studies Shanks for a moment. Shanks wonders if he can see past the guileless smile that Roger had taught him. “We’re the organization that found you on ice.”

Shanks nods easily, even if he doesn’t believe a word out of his mouth, “Pleasure to meet you, Agent Monkey. I hope that we’ll be able to help each other.”

“Yeah, help,” Garp mutters, turning to look out the window.

Shanks doesn’t push it, looking out at the blur of people and vehicles, because he’s scared too. Things are so different to what he remembers, the people look the same but the buildings and the machines, they’re only slightly alike. But the worst part is not knowing. Not knowing if they found Benn or his body, if Makino died in the base after he crashed, if Roger was still out there looking for him like he had promised on that last call. Shanks has always, always hated not knowing more than he has anything else.

“Follow me,” Garp says when the vehicle’s parked, somewhere dark and underground. “We’re going to get you set up in a room for the night. Provide you with more clothes. Tomorrow, however, we’ll have to start asking questions.”

“Do I get to ask any of those questions?” Shanks asks, staring at the cuffs that are clipped around his wrists, like he’s a prisoner. They won’t hold him, they’re not the speciality kind that Roger had made when Linlin and Kaido had gone rouge. “Or is this going to be one sided?”

Garp grits his teeth, loud enough for Shanks to hear it, “We’ll see.”

“That normally means no,” Shanks says brightly, eyes narrowing as the number of people with weapons increases. “I’m not a prisoner, am I, Agent Monkey?”

“No,” Garp lies. “You’re a guest and one that should be protected. The cuffs are to make sure that you don’t hurt anyone by accident. Sometimes things are,” he pauses, the floor bending under his feet. “Fragile.”

Shanks smiles, biting back the urge to snarl and rip himself free, “I’m sure that I wouldn’t know. After all, it’s not like I destroyed your other building or anything.”

He takes more joy than he should out of the slamming of the door when Garp leaves him in his rooms. There’s going to be more time to rile him up, to get what Shanks needed out of him. But first, Shanks closes his eyes and hates the tears that are already welling up in them, he needed answers. He hates that part of him knows that Benn would have already gotten everything they needed.

Because Benn is dead, even if Shanks wishes he wasn’t, and Shanks has never wanted him to be alive more than now.

* * *

“We found you in the Arctic,” Garp explains, pushing a picture across the table. There’s a plane, mostly hidden by the ice, taken before they had started to excavate it, unless Shanks is mistaken. “We’ve had teams searching for you for a long time now, when one of them spotted the plane, they requested backup. You were found in the cockpit with your sword and brought up to where a caravan had been set up. We were surprised to find that you still had a heartbeat when you were defrosted.”

Shanks smiles, resting his chin on his palm as he studies Garp, watching for his reactions, “Was told by the doctors that the serum would make me stronger. More resilient,” he tips his head to the side, trying to look like he’s thinking. “Called it being superhuman, I think.”

Garp nods sharply, tapping the folder on the table between them with more force than necessary, looking frustrated for a moment before it fades into something almost blandly polite, “We have some of the data for that. However, we were surprised that after you were pulled into the program and proved to be successful, that there wasn’t an attempt to recreate the process.”

It’s not a question. Shanks hasn’t figured out why Garp tends to talk around his questions instead of being straightforward. His voice goes up and his eyebrows raise at the end of his statements, but Garp never actually asks. Which is exactly the sort of things that Roger had taught Shanks to take ruthless advantage of, since Shanks had proven to be a poor liar at the best of times. 

“There wasn’t time to keep up to date with the project beyond what I was taking part in as a volunteer. Sometimes Roger would complain about the funding issues and how there wasn’t enough equipment when Rayleigh wasn’t around to listen to him, but there was too much going on to really try and wonder about others,” Shanks shrugs, shifting forward to hide his mouth with his palm as he strugs, Garp’s eyes moving to the sleeve tied neatly above the elbow on his left. “By the time that I was headed to the front lines, the project had been sidelined and there wasn’t time to find out why.”

“And after that?”

Shanks’ smile twists into a smirk, still hidden behind his palm as Garp’s mounting frustration, “I saw Rayleigh twice in the three years before my incident and mostly at a distance. Roger was maybe double that. They were too busy and too important to the war effort to sit around and explain to me why there wasn’t going to be another attempt. I had always hoped for a chance to ask after the war,” he trails off deliberately, keeping his eyes downcast, watching Garp’s reaction.

Garp’s hand goes tight around his pen, knuckles bleeding white before he deliberately releases it, dropping the pen onto the file to flex his fingers. There’s a moment of pride at drawing a reaction from him finally, but nothing like Shanks thinks he should be feeling, it’s tempered by all the things that Garp won’t tell him. 

Few of Shanks’ questions have been answered and none of those answers have been about Shanks’ unit, Makino, or Benn. All talk of Roger and Rayleigh have been in context with the war effort and how Roger had started searching for Shanks as soon as there had been a moment to start. Nothing about what happened after the war, if there had been an after.

That is what sits most uneasily in Shanks’ chest, because for all that he wasn’t the only super soldier or the most important piece in the war, nothing that Garp said had anything to do with the war being over. And Shanks wanted the war to be over. Too many people, good people, had died fighting for the war to keep going on like it had been. They had been so, so close to taking Berlin when he had crashed, either the Americans or the Russian, there was no way that the war had dragged on for years after that.

Garp opens his mouth, to ask something else that Shanks will either refuse to answer or won’t know the answer to, when the door opens, rebounding off the wall with the force of it, before stopping.

“This is a private meeting,” Garp snaps, pushing himself upright, his chair slamming onto the ground behind him. “You have no right to interrupt us.”

“A private meeting,” the man in the doorway repeats, an eyebrow arched over the top of his sunglasses, hands hooked through the belt loops of his pants. “That certainly sounds interesting, wouldn’t you agree, Marco?”

“I think it is, considering,” Marco agrees bored, looking the same as Shanks had last seen him in the middle of the German countryside as Edward had taken his unit to march on one of the concentration camps. “Shall I?”

Shanks bites the inside of his cheek to keep his mind on the present, ignoring the memories that he’s been resolutely pushing to the side since he had woken up that first day after his attempted escape. The tone of his voice is so familiar, so similar to Benn’s when he had been sick of Shanks’ shit.

“Please do.”

Marco steps past him, glancing at Shanks only once, without a hint of the smile that Shanks remembers seeing when they were about to play someone, “This is documentation showing that MARINE has violated the terms of the contract they have with my client’s company,” he sets a second folder on the first. “This is a list of violations and termination documentation.”

“Violations,” Garp repeats, looking confused as he stares at the folders and back to Marco, barely stopping to look at the man in the doorway. “What violations?”

“We have several, very in depth, interference clauses in all of our military and paramilitary contracts. MARINE strong-armed their way onto the excavation of Agent Shanks Akagami’s aircraft and barred our recovery teams from the area,” Marco’s smile is sharp as he taps the top folder. “An activity awarded solely to one company after the crash of Agent Akagami. This also activates one of the lesser used clauses in our contracts, which means that MARINE is blacklisted from dealing with our company for the next five years.”

“There seems to be a misunderstanding,” Garp says slowly, his breath hissing through his clenched teeth.

“There really doesn’t seem to be,” the man in the doorway states, smirking dangerously as he steps into the room, quieter than Shanks had been expecting him to be. “Your agency violated the terms of our contract and now must suffer the consequences. Including a rather large fine for the breaching of the contract,” he tips his head to Marco. “Marco will be handling this situation.”

“I’ll have it settled before the end of the day,” Marco says firmly, picking up both folders and raising an eyebrow as he studies Garp. “Unless my hands are forced.”

“You’re the best,” the man says easily, smile vanishing as he finally looks over at Shanks. At least, Shanks thinks it’s the first time he’s looked at him. “Unless MARINE has given you something you want to keep, Agent Akagami, we’ll be moving you to a new location at this time. Is there anything that you would like us to gather?”

“My clothes and my sword. Anything that they might have found of mine at the crash site,” Shanks answers. “Please.”

“I’ll see it done,” Marco states, something small and bright in his hands. “I believe you and I have a very important meeting with your boss to get to, Agent Monkey.”

“Of course,” Garp hisses through his teeth.

Shanks watches them leave, the door almost silent as it shuts behind them. It’s unsettling as he waits for the man to say something. He doesn’t, doing something with a device similar to what Marco had, looking as if he’s got bored with everything until the device chimes, followed by a voice.

“The location is secure, Captain. There is currently nothing capable of recording nor is there a way for anything to be used to gain access to record this conversation.”

“Thanks Deuce,” the man says, picking up the chair that Garp had dropped and sitting in it, sliding his sunglasses up on top of his head as he studies Shanks. His eyes don’t linger on Shank’s missing arm the way that Garp and the fake nurses had, moving back to his face before he says anything else. “I’ve heard stories about you my whole life, Agent Akagami.”

“I can’t say the same about you, sir.”

He laughs, shaking his head once before sobering quickly, looking tired as he crosses his arms over his chest, “What did Agent Fist tell you about the world currently?”

“Nothing,” Shanks admits, closing his eyes for a moment to collect his thoughts. “He and his organization seemed more interested in my abilities and why they never attempted another subject. But you know the answers to that, don’t you?”

“Project Yonko was scrapped because only half of the subjects sided with the Allied Forces. Both Agents Linlin and Agent Kaido were put down before they could contribute to Allied deaths. Agent Newgate and yourself were the only agents to survive and side with the Allies.”

Shanks nods, ignoring the swirling sense of unease at the way the answer is worded, “What year is it?”

“2010. April 3rd, 2010. You’re currently in the New York Headquarters of MARINE. Don’t ask me what it stands for, I’ve never gotten a straight answer.”

“That’s sixty-five years. It’s been that long?” Shanks can’t breathe. He can’t think, because that’s a lifetime. He’s missed a whole lifetime.

“It has,” he pauses, looking regretful as he continues. “Most of your unit passed in the years between your crash and today, however, I do believe that Buggy Clown and Edward Newgate are both still alive and rather active in their communities. Agent Makino was hospitalized three days ago for an emergency surgery and is recovering well.”

“Roger?”

“Roger Gol died ten years ago in a plane crash alongside his wife. Rayleigh is still a member of the Gol Corps board of directors, but is less active in the company.”

Shanks swallows hard, throat feeling tight as he studies his hand intently, because for all that he had thought Roger and his friends had been dead, there had still been the hope that they weren’t, “Benn?”

“Benn Beckman’s body was never recovered. Roger spent years and millions of dollars hunting for both you and Beckman, but nothing was ever recovered. He wanted to keep that promise, you know.”

“Thank you, for telling me,” Shanks bites out, refusing to close his eyes because he’ll see it again, see Benn falling and know that it’s his fault. “What will happen to me now?”

The man studies him for a moment, tipping his chair back on two legs thoughtfully, “Technically, due to the contract you signed with Roger, you belong to Gol Corp. To my understanding it was supposed to protect you should there be any attempts to take your DNA?” he shrugs, planting his chair back down. “You’ll be escorted to Gol Corp’s New York Headquarters to start therapy.”

“Therapy?”

“For the loss of time and what you experienced in the war. And to help you adjust to this era. There were several talks about how best to handle this situation. If we had been able to speak with you directly, you would have been included in those talks, but it was only recently discovered when MARINE was keeping you.”

“How do you fit into all of this?”

“I’m Ace Portgas-Gol, current CEO of Gol Corp. Roger was my father.”

Shanks tips his head to the side, glad for something, anything, to focus on, “You don’t look much like him.”

Ace laughs, unoffended unless Shanks’ missed his mark, “I usually hear the opposite you know. That I look more like him than I do my mother.”

“You have his coloring,” Shanks admits, the memory of Roger smiling excitedly at his work,  _ alive _ , enough to hurt. “But that’s gotta be your mom’s face. Roger wasn’t much of a looker,” he glances over Ace’s shoulder, looking around him instead of at him. “The contract was to protect me, you don’t have to honor it.”

“He asked me to and it was in his will,” Ace shrugs and Shanks doesn’t miss the way his mouth goes tight and his shoulders seem to lock for a moment. It’s enough to make Shanks wonder what kind of man Roger was after the war. “Unless you have a fondness for dimly lit rooms and people who ask stupid questions, I think it might be time for us to head out.”

“Lead the way.”

Ace smirks, rolling to his feet the same way Makino used to and leading the way out the room and down a number of hallways, each of them painted the same dull gray, like he knew where he was going, until they ended up at a series of glass doors.

“Did we win?” Shanks asks finally, watching the cars going past, the same sleek lines he remembers from Roger’s designs, but none of them flying. “The war, I mean. They never said what happened.”

“The Allies won the war. It wasn’t perfect and both sides did horrible things afterwards, but the Nazis lost and Hitler killed himself before he could be captured,” Ace frowns as he steps outside, holding the door for Shanks. “They’re still around, Nazis, calling themselves new names and pushing the same ideas.”

Shanks laughs bitterly, “That sounds exactly like what I expected. Will you be able to tell me about it? I missed a lot.”

“If I can’t, Deuce can. Or if you’d rather, we can hire someone to teach history to you.” Ace assures, nodding to the man, with the strangest updo that Shanks has ever seen, who opens the door to the car idling in front of them as he slides into it. Shanks follows, unsure what else to do. “Money isn’t exactly an issue.”

“I’d rather not waste your money like that.”

Ace laughs, grin lopsided as he pulls the device from his pocket again, “Roger set up an account for you, in case we found you and you needed time to recover. There’s plenty of money in there for you to never have to worry about anything,” he shrugs, looking at it instead of Shanks. “You should focus on your recovery.”

“And after?”

“When your therapist thinks that you’re ready to start integrating back into society, we can talk. You can get a job or go into a college for a degree. Do an apprenticeship if you’re interested. But only after we’re sure that you’re ready for it.”

Shanks feels the worry falling from his shoulders, the guilt that he always felt at being able to do nothing, “I see.”

“Roger said you hated doing nothing, in the stories,” Ace taps his thumbs against the device, Shanks wonders what it can do, looking thoughtful. “Just because you’re going to start with therapy doesn’t mean that you won’t be learning. There’s sixty-five years worth of technology to learn.”

“Technology?”

Ace smiles excitedly, just like Roger when he got to tell someone about what he was working on, “We have portable phones. There’s a world of information at our fingertips. You’ll see and besides, you’ll have two of the best teachers to learn how to use it.”

“You and Marco?”

“Marco is good at technology, but it’s not his favorite thing. No, I mean Deuce,” Ace tilts the device in his hands towards Shanks. “Say hello to our guest, Deuce.”

“Nice to meet you, Agent. I’m Deuce, the captain’s AI.”

“Artificial intelligence,” Ace adds at a whisper, winking when Shanks’ raises an eyebrow. “I am the foremost expert in such things.”

“Like in the novels?” Shanks asks curiously.

Ace nods, grinning excitedly as he leans back in his seat, “I mean, slightly. I did base a lot of Deuce’s initial code work on early Science fiction novels and the laws that they hold machines to. But he’s had some updates. Looks like we’re here.”

It’s not dark, if there’s one thing that Shanks has noticed about the future, it’s that things aren’t anywhere near as dark as they were in his memories. But it is underground. It looks like any number of bunkers that Shanks had taken refuge in between assignments, even just like the bunkers he had ripped apart while on assignments. The kind of place they would use to lock him away if he got out of control.

“Where are we?” Shanks asks instead of giving into the surge of panic that Ace had lied to him about everything.

“The tower has several levels of underground parking. Since the press tends to lurk outside the main entrance, at least the less reputable sectors of it, these levels connect directly to the building. It let’s us bypass crowds. I thought you might not want to deal with that.”

“Thank you,” Shanks says instead of admitting his fear, shoving his hand into the pocket on his jacket to hide the way it’s shaking, watching the lines on the ground as parked cars start to appear randomly. “You live in the tower?”

“Top ten or so floors are for my personal use,” Ace agrees, tapping on the device in his hands again as the car comes to a stop. “Follow me, Thatch has to go back to MARINE and wait for Marco to be finished.”

“What is Marco doing exactly?”

“Each contract with Gol Corp includes several conditions. They can’t sell our equipment to other people, they can’t try to recreate our equipment, most of it’s fairly standard. Normal contract nonsense. However, since Gol Corp isn’t a weapon’s manufacturing company anymore, we’ve either bought out our weapons deals or added more stipulations.”

”Not a weapon's company?”

Ace’s mouth thins as he climbs out the car, holding the door open for Shanks to follow him before closing it and hitting the roof twice, “There was an incident. Anyway, any contracts that refused the buy out where to sign secondary contracts that said they couldn’t interfere with Gol Corp interests. You’re an interest.”

Shanks isn’t sure how he feels about being an interest, but he’s also fairly sure that the wording is supposed to be because Gol Corp technically owns him. Roger hadn’t bothered with the wording on the contract, it had been a temporary measure after all when Shanks had signed it, because Shanks had needed that extra layer of protection before heading off to the fronts. Not that Roger could adjust it without Shanks there to sign it.

“Sorry,” Ace adds quickly, looking uncertain as he watches Shanks. “I don’t mean to sound like I don’t know you’re human. You are, but the paperwork we had to do to make sure we could go into MARINE and get you out wasn’t very pleasant.”

“Roger never did his best work on the fly.”

“He was an idiot. Deuce, quickest way to the penthouse.”

The hallway behind the door Ace pushes open is just as bright as the parking garage they had been in. But cleaner somehow. Shanks isn’t sure he understands it, but it’s different, he knows that much.

“Of course, captain,” Deuce states, voice coming from the walls instead of the device that Ace had with him. “Please follow the lights to the location in question.”

Halfway up the wall glows blue, a warm color that reminds Shanks of Marco’s flames for a moment before they adjust to something starker, leading down the hallway and off into the distance. Ace follows the light without hesitation until they reach an elevator, already open and waiting for them.

“Marco is better at emotions than I am,” Ace says when the door to the elevator has closed, looking more uncomfortable than he had when talking about his father. “Roger was, he wasn’t a bad father but he wasn’t… He and my mom waited a long time to have a kid and they weren’t prepared for a kid like me. It means that I’m not as emotionally well adjusted as people think.”

“Okay?”

Ace sighs, shoving his hands into his pockets, looking like he would rather be talking about anything else in the world, “It’s a warning. I want to help you and I want to make sure you have someone to talk to. For all that you and Marco at least knew of each other, we agreed that I’m the least involved with everything and if you wanted someone outside of this,” he gestures and Shanks knows what he means even if Ace has been purposefully vague. “I would be the best choice. But I wanted to warn you.”

“Roger wasn’t very good with emotions when I knew him. I doubt having a kid would have changed him overly much. But thank you, for telling me.”

“This isn’t even about me, you know. This is about you. I’m here for you. To help you.”

Shanks swallows around the lump in his throat, because it hurts so much and for all that he’s been pretending to ignore it, all he can remember is his unit and his friends and Benn, “I miss them.”

“You’re allowed to miss them,” Ace shifts, like he doesn’t know if he should touch Shanks or not. Shanks is glad he doesn’t, keeping his arms crossed over his chest. “My therapist says that. You’re allowed to miss them because they’re gone or because you missed out on things that happened to them, but you can’t hold onto that. You can miss people and still move on with your life.”

“That is profound.”

“I punched him in the face, so I suppose your reaction is healthier than mine,” Ace pauses as the elevator stops and the door opens wide. “This is the penthouse. I’ll show you to your room first, I think you might want to be alone for a bit.”

“I would really like that.”

Ace nods, leading the way down a set of halls before opening a door. The room is plain, but more than Shanks’ had in years. A bed that looks soft enough to sink into and a bathroom that he doesn’t have to share. He’s sure the water pressure is actually decent too.

“This is your room. You can decorate however you want, Deuce can help you with that. Dinner’s going to be in a couple hours and he’ll let you know that too. If you want to join us, you can or you can eat in here. Tomorrow is going to be for you to adjust and then we’ll get started on check ups and therapy.”

“Thank you.” Shanks says softly, closing his eyes when Ace says something else, the static in his ears too loud to hear it, before closing the door behind him, leaving Shanks alone.

It hurts. Shanks has been ignoring it, pretending it hasn’t since he woke up, but now it’s worse because Ace’s confirmed everything that Shanks had been hoping wasn’t true. Yasopp and Rockstar and Roo are  _ dead _ . Makino’s in the hospital because she’s in her 80’s at  _ least _ . The only people he knew well that are still alive, and seem to be well, are Buggy, Edward, and Rayleigh, and all of them have moved on with their lives. They’ve grown old and Shanks  _ hasn’t _ .

It’s almost enough to overshadow the fact that no one’s found Benn. That somewhere out there, Benn’s body is still waiting to be discovered. Probably just as frozen as Shanks had been when they had found him. Shanks almost hopes that Benn still has his dog tags, because they had taken Benn’s from him before he had woken up.

“Agent,” Deuce says softly, voice carefully modulated and almost calming. Programmed instead of a person watching him somewhere, just like the stories. “Dinner will be served shortly, shall I inform Captain and Marco that you won’t be joining them tonight?”

“Do what you think is best,” Shanks says instead, pulling his knees up to his chest as he watches the city moving outside his window. It’s better than the fake one he had before. There’s real people and cars and there’s always something new going past. It’s mindless and calming.

The colors are brighter and Shanks thinks he could sit here for days, pretending that he doesn’t remember his friends are dead and gone, without seeing all the different colors and designs of the vehicles speeding past. It doesn’t stop his mind from wandering or ease the harsh rush of heartbreak that Shanks hasn’t shaken since he watched Benn die, but he can force himself to focus on it and that has to be enough.

“Deuce said you wouldn’t be joining us,” Marco says startling Shanks from his thoughts, the sky outside even darker now. “Sorry, I thought he told you I was coming in. I had some things that I got MARINE to return that you might like. And dinner.”

“Thank you, for both.”

Marco sets the tray down on the table by the bed before joining Shanks on the ground by the window, “I don’t remember you. Not really. Every time I die, I lose my older memories. It’s hard sometimes. But I do remember some things and what I don’t remember first hand, I have them written down,” he stops for a moment, offering Shanks a small package. “The world is different now.”

“I have noticed,” Shanks admits, accepting it and tugging the strings slowly. His heart aches at the sight of Benn’s dog tags, the little chip from the gunshot that had almost killed him on the shores of Normandy. “You…”

“You loved him, I remembered that and it took me a while to get them to return your tags,” Marco smiles, kinder than Shanks remembers him being when Shanks had gone out of his way to tease him because Marco had always been too serious. “People still don’t like it. They’ve always been like that, but it’s not illegal anymore.”

Shanks laughs bitterly, pressing his hand against his eyes as they water, “So you did know.”

“I did. I wouldn’t have said anything, but I knew,” Marco glances back to the door, looking as old as Shanks knows he is. “Ace won’t judge you, if you tell him. He can’t really.”

“You two?”

Marco hums, resting his chin on his knees as he watches Shanks, “Me and him. Like I said, people will still judge you, people will always judge each other, but it’s not illegal. You can mourn Benn however you want to. As your friend or as your lover. Even as both.”

“Thank you. For this and telling me,” Shanks sniffs, trying to keep the tears at bay as he traces his thumb over the raised letters of Benn’s name. “My sword?”

“You’re lucky to be getting a spoon for dinner, the doctors think you’re a suicide risk,” Marco’s joke falls flat, one that they’ve used so many times before between battles and meetings, because that’s exactly why Shanks isn’t getting his sword back anytime soon, but he shrugs it off as he stands back up, reaching into his jacket for something else. “Ace found this. He said that everyone deserved to have a picture of those they cared about.”

Shanks’ hand shakes as he accepts the pictures. There’s his unit, all of them pressed in together and horribly out of regulation as Makino takes their picture to commemorate their first mission. There’s Makino with her mouth full and gravy splattered on her reports in the mess hall, there’s Benn, alive and smiling as he throws one arm over Shanks’ shoulders, looking like he’s never been happier, leaning in too close to whisper something into Shanks’ ear even though it was dangerous and there had been rumors circulating through camp about them.

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome. Get some rest, Shanks. The world isn’t going to stop moving, not even for you, but we’re here for you.”

Shanks closes his eyes until he hears the door close and Ace’s voice, too loud to have been anywhere but hovering nearby, asking Marco if everything was okay. It hurts, it’s so much and Shanks’ lost everything that he’s ever known, but he won’t give up. He won’t let himself rot away or stay here, pretending that he’s okay. 

But tonight, he’s going to mourn them. Mourn all the memories and times they had, all the things he’s missed, the people that he’s lost. And tomorrow, he’s going to get up and learn and adjust to this new world, because Benn would never forgive him if he didn’t.

“There’s no stars here, Benn. You would hate it, so bright even at night that there isn’t even enough shadows to hide in,” Shanks whispers, leaning his forehead against the glass, thumb sliding over Benn’s name. “I miss you.”


End file.
